Monthly Archives: September 2011

Our newest employee Emily Christensen is hard at work in PA this weekend. Working on her show COLLISION CROSS SECTION at Goggle Works Center for the Arts’ Cohen Gallery in Reading PA. Whilst she is putting up walls and hanging the pieces, we are in the office mailing all the tickets for the upcoming Print Fair in November!

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Pavilion of Art & Design New York is produced in partnership by Sanford L. Smith & Associates and Societe d’Organisation et Culturelle.

We are bringing together a combined 40 years of experience in organizing and operating international art fairs.

SLS is proud to note the participation of many Modernism/Art20 alumni – Friedman Benda, Modernity, Didier, and Rosella Colombari are among those appearing in the Pavilion of Art & Design at The Park Avenue Armory, November 9th through November 14, 2011.

This inaugural fair coincides with New York’s fall cultural season and Impressionist, Modern, Contemporary Art and Design auctions. We are bringing together a selection of international galleries that will present exceptional works of Modern Art, Design, Fine and Decorative Arts, Photography, Jewelry, and Tribal Art, from the 1890s to today. The fair will provide a unique opportunity to see and buy works by blue-chip artists, as well as historic and established designers vetted by a panel of experts; allowing one to buy in confidence.

PAD NY has been designated “THE” event of the season!

Your ongoing patronage of our fairs shall leave you with nothing but excitement as we enter this new stage of Fine Art Fair production.

Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Dargerat the American Folk Art Museum in 2008 showcased contemporary artists who were making work influenced by ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger. Intersections between self-taught and schooled artists pervade the contemporary art world. In this week’s NYTimes, Ken Johnson makes the reference in his review of her current exhibition at Dodge Gallery: Like a rural outsider artist, Ms. Williams mixes gnarly branches, roots and tree trunks, plumbing hardware, patterned paper, beads, feathers, doll parts, bones and lots more natural and non-natural stuff into pantheistic poetry. The biggest and most impressive efforts resemble arboreal spirits come to life in a magical forest at the edge of a junkyard. One over eight feet tall, called “birth right,” has a peak-roofed wooden bird feeder for a head and is doing a stomping dance on twiggy legs and splayed feet. Another, “equiv.o.cal,” looks at first just like a 12-foot-long tree branch; look again and it becomes a reclining, spread-legged female figure in erotic ecstasy…read review on nytimes.com

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Luise Ross Gallery- New York (luiserossgallery.com)Minnie Evans: Paintings and Drawings September 8- October 29

Highlights of Minnie Evans’ life were often expressed in her art. She spoke of visions in which God told her to “draw or die” and from this instructive, fifty years of artistic creation followed. In addition, her love of nature, stemming partly from her job as a gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens, permeates her work with an intensity similar to her religious fervor.

Her early experiments with drawing often seem child like, with imaginary faces peeking out of decorative scrolls and repetitive dots and dashes. As Evans spent much of her time making art, it became more sophisticated, sometimes highly decorative, and always inventive. The paintings, rugs and urns she saw in the homes where she also worked as a domestic, served as inspirations. These influences only enhanced her already substantial visionary world.

In addition to Evans’ own fantasies, she had an earnest desire to paint in the mold of 19th century painters who she saw in the Metropolitan Museum. Her paintings startle us with their ingenuity and heartfelt renditions of inner life. From the decorative, to dreamlike worlds, to the depths of damnation, Evans makes an experience we don’t forget.

Cavin-Morris Gallery-New York (cavinmorris.com) Art Brut and Then Some: Work By Gallery Artists- September 10- October 15, **Opening September 10, 5-7 PM

The field of Art Brut and its redheaded stepchild Outsider Art, is going through some healthy changes. It has been self-referential as a field in Europe since the early part of the Twentieth Century. However, in the United States, Art Brut has only been known for about forty years. It is indeed a history that has yet to be written in its fullness. It has also taken a strangely provincial path given the universality of the art and the art makers’ visions. We almost always know it when we see it but we have yet to hear a description or definition of it that is wholly convincing.

And now we have seen enough of it that we know it has a huge range of process and presentation, and yes, of quality as well. If we think of this work and mainstream work as two circles that overlap, then we will see that there are places that are mutually exclusive and will never touch, and places that will be blended and nearly indistinguishable. This exhibition covers the circle on the non-mainstream side.

Drawing on works from Asia, the United States and Europe, this exhibition ranges from the autistic spirit plant forms drawn by Anthony Hopkins, the healing basket-like constructions of Emery Blagdon, the mediumistic-guided drawings of Helen Butler Wells, and the psychic weather maps of Zdenek Kosek to the obsessive and pointed drawings of Chris Hipkiss, Timothy Wehrle and James Watkinson. Mix in the canny sculpture of Mort Golub, Kevin Sampson and Chrissy Callas with the art brut works in clay from Japanese artists, Yoshiaki Fujikawa, Kazumi Kamae, and Masami Yamagiwa. Further mix in the intensely drawn heart-sung images of Pushpa Kumari and the new haunting beaded, stitched, and painted sculptures by Sandra Sheeny and it becomes even more obvious that no one sound byte can own this field any longer.

There are also works by outsider artists Ike Morgan, Royal Robertson, Judith Scott, and more, on display as part of the store-like installation of art, fashion, furniture, design, and skateboard decks at Make Skateboards at I-20, co-curated by Jonathan Lavoie and Scott Ogden, through Sept. 17.

Galerie Christian Berst- Paris (christianberst.com) **Opening September 10–The Galerie Christian Berst marks the start of the new art season each September by turning a spotlight on the contemporary, universal nature of Art Brut, presenting creative spirits from other places, both literally and metaphorically. Their works demonstrate that such art cannot be limited to a given time or culture, that it is truly universal, and that Art Brut is by no means a question of merely formal characteristics.

This year, the gallery is also delighted to offer visitors the chance to explore the world of Art Brut in even greater depth through Travelling Brut, the first ever festival of films about Art Brut. The new season of events, reflecting increasing interest in marginal forms of art world-wide, aims to bring Art Brut out of the artistic ghetto to which ignorance and indifference long condemned it.

In an eloquently symbolic gesture, the specialist art press recently highlighted the Galerie Christian Berst as one of the leading places to see contemporary art in Paris.

George Widener (*1962 in Covington, Kentucky) has pursued his interest in numbers, calendar dates, statistics and factual information since his early childhood, employing his mathematical calculating capability and his love for numerical puzzles to create art ranging from complex calendars and numerical palindromes to antiquarian landscapes and Asian scrolls. Since 2000 his art has focussed on elaborate large-scale works, which combine drawings of architectural structures with the lists of dates, statistical information and which often integrate calculations from magic squares. The result is a grid of numerical patterns and correlations of detailed numbers inspired by cartography, mathematics and numerology, that seeks to shed light on time and the unfolding of human events and the codification of the systems of chance and historical arbitrarity. Only later was he identified as a savant with Asperger Syndrome.The works presented in the exhibition are pieces that were made from the artist residency at the Neues Kunstforum in Cologne in May and June 2011.

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Tonight kicks a string of exciting openings this week as NY galleries return from summer vacation energized for the fall season. Several of these include Outsider Art Fair exhibitors, and the first of those is The Gallery at HAI, which opens tonight (now!) from 5:30-8PM at 548 Broadway, 3rd Floor http://www.hainyc.org (I’m headed over there after I finish typing this!)

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Just walked around the corner from our office at 447 W. 24th St. to drop fabric samples at Gemini G.E.L.’s temporary space at 465 W. 23rd St. (while it’s new Chelsea Gallery is being prepared) and was glad to have a few minutes to view the beautiful framed prints displayed as part of their annual Private Sale Event. I think my personal favorite was the John Baldessari “Noses & Ears, Etc.”, hmmm or maybe the Jasper Johns Untitled Lithograph from 1992…or, an exciting surprise, Allen Ginsberg’s Untitled #3 from 1998. Then again, the 81″ wide Lichtenstein “La Sortie”, a 6 color wood cut from 1991, was hard to look away from…I may have to stop back, as it’s on view until October 1. Of course Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, like the other exhibitors, is busy preparing for the 2011 IFPDA Print Fair November 3-6 at the Park Avenue Armory, and we are all eagerly anticipating what they will have on view at the Print Fair this year!

GEMINI G.E.L. AT JONI MOISANT WEYL was established in 1984 as the New York gallery exhibiting and representing the publications of the Los Angeles-based artists’ workshop, Gemini G.E.L. The gallery shows new editions as they are published, and has mounted many historical survey exhibitions, including A Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg: Prints and Objects; The Private Eye of Philip Guston: The Gemini Editions; Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonals and Panels 1970-1990; Claes Oldenburg: Editions in Two and Three Dimensions 1969-1995; Ken Price: Prints and Ceramics 1970-2005; Frank Stella: Prints from the 1960’s & 70’s; and Artists at Gemini G.E.L.: In Celebration of Gemini’s 25th Anniversary. The gallery began in a by-appointment loft space on Crosby Street, followed by a relocation to West Broadway in the heart of Soho during the years 1990 to 2000. In January 2007, after six years in midtown, the gallery moved to 980 Madison, where it remained until July 2011. The January 2012 relocation to 24th street in Chelsea will allow for a continuation of the gallery program on a grander scale. The gallery continues to organize special events in conjunction with its exhibitions, including book-signings, “Q & A”’s with the artist and Gemini printers, as well as private docent-led tours through related museum retrospectives. The gallery also participates in a number of local and international art fairs throughout the year and has been a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) for over 20 years.

Gemini G.E.L. began in 1966 as an artists’ workshop and publisher of hand-printed limited edition lithographs. Responding to the expanding interests of its artists, work began on its first sculpture edition in 1968 with Claes Oldenburg’s Profile Airflow, and in 1970, Frank Stella’s Pastel Stack was started as the first project in the screenprinting workshop. The etching workshop opened in 1977 and woodcuts were being made by 1980. Since 1966, Gemini has collaborated on major bodies of work with many of Contemporary Art’s most accomplished painters and sculptors.